Article No. 76

Business Practice Findings, by James Larsen, Ph.D.

Leading People into a Rut

New research reveals a common mistake involving performance feedback and demonstrates what happens when it's corrected.

Do you supervise any employees who, with a single,
sideways, suspicious glance, let you know that you should
just keep it to yourself if there's anything about their job
performance you don't like? For most managers, these
employees are familiar. They resist change, they don't want
promotions, they won't learn anything new, and they don't
improve.

Has anyone ever suggested you cause this, that employees
wouldn't develop these qualities if you did your job
differently?

Logic has always pointed to this conclusion.

Employees never start this way. They're fresh and
curious. They dream of running the company someday, and they
want to improve, pestering you for feedback.

And telling them how to improve doesn't seem awkward, but
this soon changes. Soon, they're giving us suspicious
glances, too. It must be something we're doing, but what
could it be?

Everyone at all levels of management struggles with this
question, and now a remarkable study conducted by a team from
the University of Akron, led by Paul Levy, has supplied the
answer: Privacy.

We've always been reminded to provide performance feedback
in private. Indeed, that's one of the main reasons we have
offices. But Levy, et al., discovered the real meaning of
privacy in providing feedback. It means without anyone else
being there, even us! EVEN US!

Levy's team discovered that all the negative qualities
we're accustomed to seeing, disappear when people receive
honest feedback on demand, from a computer. Like checking
your credit by logging on to a data base, people who check
their performance ratings without anyone knowing about it
increase
their frequency of seeking feedback over time! And that's a
remarkable discovery.

Levy and his team created a performance task for 192
subjects and repeated it over 4 trials. Any time during the
task, subjects could push a key on their computer terminals
to request feedback, and 77% of them did so during the first
trial. Once the key was pushed, they learned how the
feedback would be delivered, and were given an opportunity to
change their minds and bypass the feedback.

One third were told a supervisor would come and speak with
them face-to-face. One third were told a supervisor would
send feedback to their terminals (a semi-private
arrangement), and one third were told the computer would
analyze their performance and give them a report (a totally
private arrangement; feedback ratings were actually entered
by an experimenter).

Nearly 65% of those in the face-to-face group changed
their minds at this point and bypassed the feedback; 26% of
those in the semiprivate group changed their minds, but only
4% of those in the private group did so. People in the
face-to-face group were 16 times more likely to change their
minds and avoid the feedback than people in the private
group. Like children touching a hot stove, they learned very
quickly the punishing effect of pushing the feedback key and
having to face an evaluator.

All requests for feedback declined in the second trial,
but requests from people in the face-to-face group continued
declining over the third and fourth trials. Both the private
and semi private groups increased their requests for feedback
on the third trial, and those in the private group increased
their requests once again in the fourth trial, reaching the
highest level of all.

People receiving face-to-face feedback clearly were headed
toward never requesting feedback, and that's what we see with
our employees. People receiving private feedback were headed
in the opposite direction, freely requesting performance
feedback and increasing their requests over time. Imagine
what it would be like if your employees did that.

Few managers enjoy giving negative feedback. Indeed, most
of us avoid it. Levy, et al's, research reveals why we feel
this way: We don't belong there. We feel it, and so do our
employees.

Of all the people employees don't want listening to their
negative feedback, we managers probably top the list. Our
impressions often strongly impact their lives. This causes
anxiety and compels them to avoid feedback altogether. Levy,
et al., demonstrated how we can avoid causing this and showed
what will happen if we implement truly private performance
feedback. A little tinkering with our computer systems, and
it could happen.